Jim,
I think I may have figured out what happened with your dough. From your description, it sounds like you let the dough sit at room temperature after the final mix. The way that Norma has been making the poolish version of the Lehmann dough, as per my original advice and her own experiments, is to let the dough after the final mix cold ferment for about a day before using. In your case, with the sugar in the poolish most likely used up by the yeast in the 3-day poolish, all the heavy lifting during the room temperature ferment was left to the remaining yeast added as part of the final mix. Normally, that amount of yeast would not produce a lot of rise in the dough, but use of the warm water no doubt helped that process along, at least at the outset. If your room temperature was around 70 degrees F, and with the use of warm water, even with the cool poolish, it is hard to see how the finished dough temperature would be below your room temperature after 2 1/2-3 hours. You would have needed a very cold poolish and cold water as part of the final mix, and even then, based on the quantities involved, the final dough would not have has a finished dough temperature below room temperature after about 2 1/2-3 hours.
If the above was, in fact, the case, then the fermentation of the final dough would have been slow. Also, 2 1/2-3 hours would have been insufficient to allow the natural sugars in the dough to be released by enzyme action. That would have ultimately manifested itself in a light color in the final baked crust. Also, you would have not gotten as many byproducts of fermentation to contribute to final crust flavor and texture.
In short, it looks to me that you essentially baked an underfermented dough, not an overfermented dough as I originally speculated before I fully understood what you did.
Peter
